The Chinese translation of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887) at the turn of the twentieth century has been little studied, in spite of Bellamy’s obvious influence on Chinese intellectuals and reformist thinkers. Enthusiastically embraced by the intelligentsia as a gospel of social change, the utopian fiction has inspired subsequent Chinese writings of science fantasy in popular fiction. Bellamy’s tale centers on the adventure of time-traveler Julian West, a young Bostonian who is put into a hypnotic sleep in the late nineteenth century and awakens in the year 2000 in a socialist utopia. He discovers an ideally realized vision of the future, one unthinkable in his own century. This article argues that Chinese translators, in their conventional form of storytelling, have intentionally converted Bellamy’s original religious prophesy into a vision of a new and modernized state that is in line with the Chinese evolutionary historical imagination. It discusses the problematic of imagining the future by delineating the relationships of utopianism, social modernity, and temporality as the novel was written by an engaged American writer and then rendered into various Chinese versions by Western missionaries, Chinese intellectuals, and popular writers.
This article utilizes the trope of domesticity/domestication in order to explore notions of gendered temporality in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière (2003). In dialogue with the Chinese writer Eileen Chang and Western theories about women’s time and domestic temporality, the article proposes that the works of both Hou and Chang can be described as instances of écriture féminine that interrogate an ambivalence toward domesticity. Drawing on Chantal Akerman’s film in contrast to that of Hou, the article further demonstrates how the use of the cinematographic long take domesticates time and space, as well as the ways in which the horror of everyday domesticity have been captured through what Rey Chow calls “feminine details.” Finally, the present article argues that Café Lumière domesticates a fear of domesticity and pregnancy through a reconfiguration of linear and cyclical time, a reversal of gender roles in its protagonists, and a privileging of aurality over visuality in its cinematic style, such that it presents the potential for a new kind of union and a new kind of futurity premised upon reordered gendered forms of temporality.
In this article, I examine several narratives that express nostalgia through the food of Nanjing, especially those representing the famous halal (qingzhen 清真) restaurant Ma Xiangxing 马祥兴, in order to investigate how narrative time can be manipulated in order to variously position and frame history. After outlining the context of prevalent cultural nostalgia in contemporary China, I begin with a publicity narrative generated by Ma Xiangxing. I then move on to literary representations by authors such as Wu Jingzi 吴敬梓, Huang Shang 黄裳, and Ye Zhaoyan 叶兆言. Finally, I look at “Nanjing 1912,” a high-end shopping and entertainment district that attempts to invoke the Republican era in order to attract consumers. As food nostalgia evolved from a rebellion against modernity to a marketing strategy in China, it has generated narratives that embody a mix of restorative and reflective nostalgia. A linear narration of history and tradition coexists with a circular narration that challenges its accuracy; thus, not only does originality eventually become a meaningless concept, but simulation also precedes and creates reality in the general commercialization of nostalgia in post-reform China.
This article examines the adoption of ghost marriage (冥婚) as a literary theme in twentieth-century Chinese literature, arguing that this theme reflects a set of changes in perceptions of temporality from the premodern to the modern period. As a traditional ritual of holding marriage for the dead, ghost marriage embodies premodern views of time and space wherein the living and the dead are perceived as coexisting in parallel spaces, and the boundary of life and death is seen as transcendable through the extension of kinship. In this way, the dead are kept within the family, maintaining the warmth of familial relationships that transcend being and non-being. Modern authors, promoting a linear view of time, have taken up ghost marriage as an anchoring point of nostalgia for an unrecoverable ethics-based society. For instance, Yan Lianke’s 阎连科1994 novella Searching for the Land (寻找土地) announces the utter corruption—and therefore the death—of ethics-based society, suggesting that the only alternative is to confront the future as a road to hope rather than indulge in an illusion of the past. Through an analysis of Yan’s novella, this essay discusses how the theme of ghost marriage fits into the broader literary context of the early 1990s while also anticipating some of the distinctive elements of Yan Lianke’s subsequent novels.
In The Explosion Chronicles (Zhalie zhi 炸裂志), Yan Lianke combines ancient and contemporary practices of constructing and destructing, building and burning, in a literary style he calls mythorealism. The fictional chronicles relay a history of development written in the modern language of growth, documenting the development of a community called Explosion, which subsumes a discussion of economic growth within a theme of twisted temporality. This article uses The Explosion Chronicles to interrogate the temporal assumptions inherent in contemporary discourses of economic development in China. At the heart of my analysis of these tropes is a critique of the ideological function of linear time. Time can be arrested in economic growth, becoming an interface that activates intersubjective gazes before narratives mature.
The time-travel genre of Chinese Internet literature combines old mythological motifs with contemporary science fiction approaches to create a narrative line in which the protagonist travels through time, undergoes a series of trials, discovers new worlds, and realizes an idealized life. Borrowing Foucault’s theory of utopian bodies and heterotopias and taking Tianxia Guiyuan’s female-oriented Internet novel Empress Fuyao as its exemplary case, this study analyzes how time-travel fiction uses time travel in order to image a “utopia” and what kind of “new world” is projected by this utopia. In the process, this paper will simultaneously examine the relationship between utopia and twenty-first century China’s new media literature.
This essay uses the notion of a symptom to examine the ways in which temporality is deployed in Hong Kong author Dung Kai-Cheung’s 2007 novel, Histories of Time . In particular, the essay follows Dung’s own lead, in Histories of Time , and considers the peculiar temporality implicit in the concept of figuration in Biblical hermeneutics, wherein the “figure” mediates between the two distinct—yet structurally related—temporalities of the Old and the New Testaments: the “prefiguration” of the Old Testament and the “fulfillment of figuration” of the New Testament. I propose that a literary “figure,” in Dung’s work, similarly mediates between the different temporal planes within his novel, while at the same time mediating between the fictional space of the novel and the historical era within which the work is positioned. Just as a symptom is simultaneously a function of—but also structurally external to—the underlying condition that it signifies, this sort of literary figure may similarly be seen as a function of—but simultaneously external to—the historical era to which it corresponds. This sort of literary figure, accordingly, marks a point of rupture within the temporality of the novel and its corresponding era, while at the same time providing the ground on which that temporal continuum is established in the first place.